Partnerships and Collaboration Are Key to UM Shore Regional Health's New COO

LuAnn Brady, MSPH, discusses the system's growth plans and the creation of a new regional medical center.

LuAnn Brady, MSPH joined the University of Maryland Shore Regional Health (UM Shore Regional Health) in February as the organization's COO and now oversees hospital and outpatient facility operations throughout the five-county region the system serves.

UM Shore Regional Health is a nonprofit health network that serves the mid-shore region of Maryland, which includes Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne's, and Talbot counties. It operates two hospitals, University of Maryland Shore Medical Center at Easton, and The University of Maryland Shore Medical Center at Chestertown, the state's first critical access hospital, recently created by the system and the state. The system also has two free-standing emergency centers, five medical pavilions, numerous inpatient and outpatient services, and urgent care centers across the mid-shore region.

LuAnn Brady, COO, UM Shore Regional Health. Photo courtesy of UM Shore Regional Health.

In a recent interview with HealthLeaders, Brady shared how she hit the ground running in her new role and talked about UM Shore Regional Health's growth plans and the creation of the system's new regional medical center.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: How has everything been going as you settle into your role?

LuAnn Brady: It's like any new role where there are lots of people to meet, especially in this health system, because of the large geographic area that makes up the Shore Regional Health network across the five counties. In the early days, it was important to go to those places, meet people, listen to the things that they're doing, that they find challenging, that they're most proud of. It's about getting to know the place and the people.

But as with any job, there are always things that come up that you need to deal with. For example, working with some areas where we're securing some of our physician providers for the next few years, things that we have to do from a regulatory and compliance perspective that are on the calendar, equipment that breaks that you have to get in and help the leaders work through the processes. For me, that's a good learning, too, because it forces you sooner to understand the processes around emergency capital or equipment or, unfortunately in the day and time we live in, getting a lot more familiar with what we have in place around our workplace violence events and learning those processes. It's important that I'm out there and I'm meeting people and seeing where they work and what they're doing, because at some point, if you wait too late for that, you've lost that window and you've also lost your credibility as a leader.

HL: Is there anything you're hearing from staff that may have caught you off guard or that is interesting to you?

Brady: The things that every health system is struggling with post-COVID are certainly things that we're seeing here at Shore Regional as well. Those are the challenges related to our staffing and our workforce shortages, the burnout that our staff and our physicians feel. The different landscape for me is listening to those challenges now on top of our rural healthcare environment that we're in, and how significant the Chesapeake Bay Bridge is in terms of creating a significant barrier between the western shore of our state and the eastern shore, and what that means in terms of being able to recruit and [partner with schools.]

[What] I continue to find incredibly refreshing about Shore Regional is the culture and the people. I noticed, upon walking into the hospital the first day, a lot of smiling faces, people saying hello. And that's not always your experience when you walk into a hospital or into any medical complex.

HL: In your role as COO, how will you lead the hospital's operations and outpatient facilities?

Brady: As the operational leader for Shore Regional, to be successful, no one does that in a vacuum. The importance of all my team members that are part of the Shore executive leadership team is critical. Partnerships with the chief nursing officer and the chief medical officer are critical, because when you think about that trifecta relationship of operations and clinical leadership, those three roles are important in leading the level of quality and safety and operationally efficient programs that we need to lead in these times. The relationship with our chief financial officer and our human resources executive, all of those come into play because no one can know everything about what it takes to operate a complex system like we do in hospitals, ambulatory facilities, home care, and post-acute [facilities].

The University of Maryland Medical System is on that journey [of becoming a highly reliable organization (HRO)]. We started the executive academy for our most senior leaders in January, and even though I wasn't with the organization formally at that time, I started to participate in the weekly executive academies to learn about the framework and the operational characteristics of being an HRO.

One of the critical points of the HRO model is that you're always deferring to expertise. That's important for us as a senior leadership team, deferring to one another's expertise, but it's also critical in deferring to the expertise of our department directors and managers and frontline workers, because they're the people that are closest to the work every day and are teaching us where are the pain points, where are the things that aren't working. Our job in the leadership role is to help them frame those problems and make sure that we're supporting them and how they problem solve. We're looking toward the future in terms of where we need to go to continue to create that access and safe care, and right care at the right time, but doing that in a collaborative way with your team.

HL: Part of your role will be managing the construction of the new Regional Medical Center. Can you talk about the project and how you'll be involved?

Brady: The new Regional Medical Center is, in some ways, the cherry on the sundae of what has been over a decade of work that folks from both University of Maryland Medical System and the Shore Regional Health team have been doing to build out a network of healthcare facilities across the five county areas. That includes the two hospitals, two freestanding emergency centers, a number of medical office buildings and pavilions, and several urgent care facilities. All of those things have come to be over the last 10 years along with the robust primary care physician medical group, UM Shore Medical Group, along with some key subspecialties that have now created this opportunity for the Regional Medical Center.

What's exciting is that for me, I get to join the journey that many of my team members have been on for a number of years. We are looking at about 330 acres of land on Ocean Highway, where there will be about a 380,000-square-foot building. That will be both a hospital and a medical office building with about 147 licensed beds.

Where I came from at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, I had the opportunity to be part of a team to build and open a 504-bed hospital pavilion that created a large academic medical center. One of the exciting things about building a new building is how you go about engaging the teams, the staff, to be part of the design concept with you. Going back to high reliability, if we think about deferring to the experts, the people who know how to take care of the patients and the people who are doing it every day, then we want their input because we're going to be talking about new space, [and] we're talking about changing workflows.

When I was at the University of Pennsylvania, a design-and-build company helped us with these rooms made out of Styrofoam that people could walk through and provide input on where things were in the room. I think we'll have the opportunity to do that with the new Regional Medical Center. We're just kicking off our relationship with our design-and-build partners who are going to be helping us with that. It is an exciting time for people to think about ways to do their job in new and different ways and what they need to do that.

I never thought I'd have the opportunity to be a part of two new hospitals in my career. But now I have the second opportunity. I live here on the mid-shore so it's exciting for me to be part of this on a personal level because it's where I live, and to know that I'll be part of helping to design what the future of the healthcare platform will look like here on the mid-shore.

HL: Are there other things you're looking forward to in your role?

Brady: Maryland is a very unique state, and I've had the opportunity to work at the University of Maryland before. About 13 years ago, I was at the downtown Medical Center, and it was my first experience in academic medicine. It was the place where I first appreciated how much I loved academic medicine because every day you came to work and everyone was focused on the delivery of excellent care. There were all kinds of inventions, and the first this and the first that, that were happening, and so it's an exciting place to be part of. I was happy to be able to come back 13 years later.

I see Maryland as a progressive state when it comes to healthcare, and everything that they've done since the 1970s in terms of being a waiver state, and having one payer, and how that in fact benefits the ability to not pass cost from one payer to another but support the needs of uncompensated care. The state has stayed progressive in looking at the global budgeting, but also the work that they're doing around population health and population management.

To me, it makes the work that we need to do around ensuring access and making sure that people have the care that they need, where they need it, a little bit easier, because when you're operating in a state where the payers aren't paying you for that, it's almost like you don't have that burning platform to be able to accomplish what you know is the right thing to do for the patient. But in Maryland, the state has created the environment for us to be able to do that. To me, it's a real plus. It can be challenging, and people can speak to the challenges of what that is, but I see it as a real positive when we're talking about access and when we're talking about population health and population management, which is really what healthcare is all about.

HL: What has your experience been as a woman leader in healthcare?

Brady: I came into healthcare in the mid-1980s, and so I have experienced a lot as a woman in terms of how we're perceived in leadership roles. It's really encouraged me to—and I have done a lot of this work in the last five years—be a mentor and a role model to women in healthcare and women who express interest in advancing and becoming leaders. I had a boss one time who said to me that it all comes back to our behavior and how we behave as a leader. That really is so critical in the work that we do, and I've never forgotten that. I try to share that with not only other women leaders, but just people in general, who want to grow and develop.

But as much as I have people that I look to and admire, I've also learned just as much from behaviors that you see that you think that's not something I would want to adopt. That's not a model that I would want to take on for others to see. And so, you learn from both sides. I still learn every day about sitting back and reflecting on how did I handle that, could I have handled that better? And that's something we all have to do because that's how we make sure that we're keeping our awareness right at the sharp edge.